Thursday, December 18, 2014

Just Counterterrorism

Terror attacks and threats remain at frustratingly high
levels even though governments continue to spend enormous sums on
counterterrorism operations by the police, armed forces, and other agencies.
The seemingly intractable problem of terrorism often leads people to believe
that terrorism has no solution. The actual difficulty is that terrorism has no
widely accepted definition. Government officials, scholars, the media, and the
public all indiscriminately conflate the violence of non-state terror groups,
insurgents, mass murderers, and harsh, non-democratic states into the single
problem labeled terrorism.

Good problem solving begins by carefully defining the
problem to be solved. My new book, Just
Counterterrorism, defines terrorism as violence by non-state actors
against innocent people for political purposes. This definition circumscribes a
distinct problem for which solutions exist. Just
Counterterrorism then analyzes what terrorists want, how terror groups
end, and why law enforcement and warfighting models are both inadequate for
shaping effective, ethical counterterrorism. These analyses explain the need
for a new counterterrorism model that is comprehensive, effective, ethical, and
flexible.

The proposed Just Counterterrorism Model's
components—Justice for the Attacked, Justice for Terrorists, and Justice for
Others—comprehensively address the problem of non-state terrorism. Each
component includes a set of criteria for ethically assessing or shaping
counterterrorism strategy and tactics regardless of a terror group's
composition, ideology, or geography. John Rawls' concept of justice as fairness
pervasively informs the Just Counterterrorism Model. Numerous examples,
primarily from US and Israeli counterterrorism, mini case studies of
extraordinary rendition and targeted killing, and a fuller case study of
British counterterrorism in Northern Ireland, demonstrate the Model's potential
for shaping effective counterterrorism.

Justice for the Attacked explores how communities when
attacked or threatened by non-state terrorists can best respond to minimize
terrorist gains in an attack's aftermath and to defend against future attacks.
Justice for Terrorists outlines protocols for states to follow in apprehending
terrorists where the rule of law prevails, interdicting them elsewhere, and
adjudicating and punishing those arrested or captured. Justice for Others
sketches the moves that states can implement to sever the vital connections
between a terror group and the constituency or constituencies that enable the
terror group to pose a viable threat.

Read Just
Counterterrorism and discover that effective counterterrorism must be
ethical (e.g., torture only makes the problem of terrorism worse), depends upon
those attacked responding virtuously, and addresses the underlying problems.